Pulling threads
Notes and news from the present moment, on its swift way to becoming past.
Familiar Ground
It was so wet, and varied, as it is there in November. Such dynamic skies! The rain and wind and mist, the drama — things I know, deeply, but after such a long time away, my embodied perspective has shifted. I saw anew the scale of hills and mountains, and the hovering, dawn-coloured light that hugs the horizon’s mist for most of each day. Cedar and salt. A northern, maritime, rainforest place.
Poiesis
The practices I have been gathering and that I share when teaching, are things I experience as methods of “homecoming” — coming to rest in being, whole. “Creative” or not, I believe we all, by the fact of living, are in the process of bringing forth what has not before been expressed, what has not before been realized. This is poeisis.
A Living Being, Feeling the Sun
I am working on a book that follows the lives of several families in the early 1900s, in a very rugged and remote part of the west coast. I have been reading widely many writers from that time period, to understand more deeply how that literature depicted it’s own time, to get a feel for how people understood the historical moment from within it. One of the writer’s I have come to read in this quest is Willa Cather, and her story of an orphaned settler boy. She writes this 10-year-old character with great tenderness, and through him, in two brief passages, Cather delivers a profound teaching that sounds like buddhist or yog philosophy to me.
On Being Whole
As a much younger person, a teenager, in my early twenties, even into my forties — the question was still: WHAT SHOULD I DO? WHO WILL I BECOME? I remember the blessing of wise, older friends, who shared with me that it all just made more sense when they got to their fifties — all the disparate things that had called to them in their life had a logic that became clear. Maybe it hadn't made sense in a rational “career path,” but all those things pointed toward themselves.
Tending the Root
Tending the root for growth and bloom — in the throes of creative process, complication and simplification, I see how this process is constant in all growth. Elaborate expression, and pruning…where does this show up in your life?
Waves of the Mind
I have been thinking about the ways human beings find meaning in pattern, how that serves as a strategy for coping with uncertainty, and the ways this ability can be both benevolent and not.